The nature-inspired sensual expression of her colleagues at Worpswede did not satisfy Paula Modersohn-Becker. She recognised that the important ideas were only to be found in the artistic centre of Paris. She soon fled the limited possibilities of Worpswede. In 1900 she travelled to Paris where she was first exposed to the artistic avant-garde. She was intoxicated by the atmosphere and sensory impressions of Paris. The paintings of Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin impressed her immensely. At the Drouot auction house, she, together with Clara and Rainer Maria Rilke, was deeply influenced by the paintings and crafts from China and Japan. She wrote in her diary:
The great strangeness of these things got to me. Our art it seems to me is still too conventional. It poorly expresses those impulses that run through us. It seems to me that the ancient Japanese art is more at ease.
Modersohn-Becker was greatly inspired while viewing the art of antiquity during a visit to the Louvre in 1903. ‘How large and easy they are to see,’ she wrote regarding the Egyptian mummy portraits… ‘forehead, mouth, eyes, nose, cheeks and chin – that is all. It sounds so simple and yet it is indeed so very, very much.’
Under the inspiration of the Egyptian mummy portraits, she began a series of self-portraits. Like the mummies, she represents herself with peculiarly large eyes and an enraptured, almost suggestive glance. Her studio is now decorated with a frieze of reproductions from these mummies, who look at the viewer and at the same time look with rapture into the distance.
Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait with a Camellia Branch, 1907.
Oil on canvas, 61.5 × 30.5 cm. Folkwang Museum, Essen.
When she returned from Paris, the local farms and children of the village became her preferred models and she sought to simplify the portrait form. Colour, for her, was more important than the depiction. In her paintings, she attempted to embody the essential character of these people, who were marked by work, poverty and the rugged landscape. She modelled her farmers and children in the same paste-like paints, avoiding any smoothness in her colour, showing them with angular features, monumental, with austere expressions, but full of sensuality. In her paintings she reflected the view people had of themselves, their strength, their inner greatness and their dignity. In her paintings she was able to express great sensitivity and emotional depth. One example is the painting Elderly Woman in the Poor House Garden. Paula Modersohn-Becker painted the old woman as if in an icon, down to earth, grainy, broad shouldered, her heavy hands placed in her lap. Placing her between wild poppies, she crowns and honours her with the glow of a reserved, clay-like colour scheme.
In her paintings the motif of mother and child achieves a quality of love, tenderness, and intimacy. The sense of emotion appears unsentimental, austere, and sincere. She masterfully understood how to transfer the essential physical and emotional part of a person into the painting, freeing it from all the surrounding ornamentation. She sought simplicity of form. In her diary, she wrote, ‘I would like to give the intoxicating, the complete, the exciting to colour – the power.’ Unfortunately, Paula Modersohn-Becker’s promising career was cut short when at the age of thirty-two, and only few days after the birth of her daughter, Mathilde, she died of an embolism. Despite the very short period of creative activity that was given her, she left behind a wide range of works: around 750 paintings and over 1000 sketches, diaries and letters. During her lifetime she just sold five paintings.
Rainer Maria Rilke described her unorthodox painting style as ‘reckless and straight on.’ At the beginning of November 1908 in Paris, he wrote a requiem for Paula in which it reads:
… And you did not say: it is I; no that is
So without curiosity was at the end your gaze
And thus without possessions, so of true grace
That it did not entice even you: holy…
In December 1908, a retrospective for Paula Modersohn-Becker was shown in Bremen. In early 1909 Paul Cassirer showed Paula’s paintings next to those of van Gogh, Manet, Monet and Renoir in Berlin. In 1927 Ludwig Roselius, founder of the coffee trading company Kaffee-Handels-Aktien-Gesellschaft (HAG), established a museum in her honour on the Böttcherstrasse in Bremen, saying: ‘Paula was a painter of the truth. Before her there was never a painter, who had painted the truth. The great painters of our time: Munch, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cézanne and the others have striven for this truth.’
During the National Socialist era, her paintings were removed from the museums and shown at the 1937 exhibit of degenerate art. Today Paula Modersohn-Becker is considered to be a major pioneer of Expressionism.
Paula Modersohn-Becker, Old PoorhouseWoman with a Glass Bottle, 1907.
Oil on canvas, 96.3 × 80.2 cm. Böttcherstraße drawings collection, Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen.
Otto Dix, Self-Portrait in Mars, 1915.
Oil on canvas, 81 × 66 cm. Haus der Heimat, Freital.
Futurism: The Dynamisation of the Image
Among the artistic movements at the beginning of the 20th century, Italian Futurism was one of the most vocal. Manifestos and proclamations were the manner by which new artistic theses were formulated and discussed in public. Often, this led to riots and brawls. This loud aggressiveness lay in the social tradition of Italian art, which in the course of the 19th century had become sterile, academic and museum-like. It was against this mummified art that the militant anger of the Futurists was directed. The Futurist upheaval understood itself to be a modern movement, open to all the forces of life and encompassing all art genres.
The poet, Tommaso Marinetti, was the force behind this movement that seized the entire art world of the West. His first Futurist manifesto came out at the end of 1908. Therein, he formulated the tenets of this new way of thinking that influenced the intelligentsia of the time.
Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute. Since we have already created the eternal, omnipresent speed… We declare that the glory of the world has been enriched by yet another beauty: the beauty of speed. A race car, whose body is decorated with pipes that are like snakes with explosive breath the roaring car, is more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace.
This sweeping success, primarily in the French art world, made the headlines of the conservative Paris newspaper, Figaro, when the manifesto was made public in French on 20 February, 1909. Shortly thereafter it appeared in Russia on 8 March, 1909, and was translated into Russian in the Petersburg newspaper Vetcher (Evening). The effect on primarily the literary avant-garde was significant. The transfer of the new intellectual trend into the visual arts happened later. However, the decisive breakthrough for the Futurist painters first happened when their travelling exhibit was opened in February 1912 at the Paris Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. They spared no expense with advertising. On the eve of the opening, the names of the five painters, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini, lit up the night in neon lights. In March, the Futurists showed their art at the London Sackville Gallery. The success was even greater than in Paris. ‘More than 350 critics showed up in one month and four days, and the gallery did not want to remove the paintings because of the great numbers of paying visitors’, Marinetti wrote to his friend, Praletta.
In April and May 1912, the Futurist exhibition travelled to the Berlin gallery, Der Sturm (The Storm). Herwarth